Jakob Goldschmidt

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Jakob Goldschmidt (also Jacob Goldschmidt) was a German-Jewish banker born on 31 December 1882 in Eldagsen and died on 23 September 1955 in New York. He studied banking under H. Oppenheimer in Hanover and in 1907 worked at the Nationalbank für Deutschland in Berlin. In 1909 he founded the private bank Schwarz. Goldschmidt held many supervisory board roles—reportedly up to 123—including positions with Ufa, founded in 1917, and IG Farben (1931–1932). He amassed a large art collection, much of which was auctioned by the Nazis in the 1940s, leading to restitution claims. In 1963 a Dutch court ruled that an Honore Daumier bronze sculpture, Ratiapil, should be returned from a museum in Cologne. In 2002 the heirs of Jakob Goldschmidt sought the return of a painting, Portrait of a Young Girl in a Bow Window, attributed to Nikolaus Alexander Mair von Landshut, from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.